Monday, February 15, 2010

E-books: Publishers poised for victory in latest battle

Publishers look set to win the latest round in the battle for supremacy on electronic books, with Google ready to offer major concessions as it prepares to enter the increasingly competitive e-book market.

Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, which will feature an electronic bookstore when it launches next month, and Amazon’s humiliation last week by a book publisher in a prices row, Google is thought to have given in to the book industry by offering it a higher share of the sale of e-books.

For the past year, Google has said that it wants to launch a service called Google Editions, where people can pay to download the latest books on to their electronic readers and computers, as many already do through the Amazon website.